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What happened to one per year? That makes more sense than waiting longer and throwing the two weakest installments out together.

Your comment just made sense to me, especially with the title of this thread: there will be an Episode II I/II: The Smell of Fear. Lt. Dannl Faytonni and Lt. Fr'ank Drebbon seek out bounty hunter Ojay Symp-Son across the galaxy.

But, this film release "news" smells of desperation. Or worse, apathy.

I suspect once they got the ILM importing process down, doing Ep 2 and Ep 3 were equally easy, and the February flop release of Ep 1 made another Feb release unwise to repeat. That said, there's zero chance that Ep 4 is going to be as easy, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've been working on its conversion for the last few months already.

Lucasfilm really needs to get this release dropped in May to July, not after August but before the holidays.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

Episodes II-III are guaranteed to not do well. Episodes IV-VI are guaranteed to do well.

I'm not saying that based on my personal lack of esteem for these movies, but the general population perceives the OT as these classics of western civilization, and the PT as, well, just kinda there. If Episode I didn't do well, the other two won't do much better. (I'm assuming they'd do a little better, since most people are wrong and think II-III are better than I, but nowhere near what IV-VI will do.)

Of course, people may realize they're the blu ray versions and not pay to seem them, anyway.

Here's the problem, the prequel 3D is going to look good, almost every shot is easier to work with because it's digitally composited in some way, often a character or vehicle or background is easy to pull out, and it's shot on digital so there's no film grain to fight. The OT was shot 36 years ago on film stock, the ANH film stock is destroyed and only the Special Editions remain and their digital effects work looks like garbage by today's standards, I mean it's shocking how awful the digital in the OT looks, it's horrendous, everything's blurry and cartoony and shoddy and jumpy, so all that is going to make a mess of the 3D conversion process. I suspect the OT won't handle conversion as well as the PT and people won't respond well to that.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

I saw about five minutes of AOTC 3D at the panel with Dennis Muren and Jon Knoll, and it definitely looks fantastic. The clip included the opening logos, Padmé's ship landing and exploding, a little of the Zam chase, Dexter Jettster, the aiwha on Kamino, C-3PO getting his head knocked off, most of the Yoda/Dooku fight, and the loyalists looking over the clones. Sometimes they were able to take background plates from ILM to make the conversion easier and cleaner, but most of the time they'll still have to just cut around everything, place it in 3D space, and then pull out the individual parts of the object and painting in the background for the separate eyes' images. I'm not sure how much of one method is used versus another. They showed examples of different artistic possibilities and are absolutely doing it right. I haven't seen a ton of 3D, but I've seen a fair amount, and TPM was probably the best example of post-conversion I've seen. So it's a shame that not many people saw it, whether they're tired of 3D or didn't like the movie or whatever (I wanted to see it more but was busy with school at the time). All the industry 3D hype aside, it really was a completely different way to see the movie and be more immersed in it, quite frankly. The AOTC footage looks deeper than that film did as well, so it might be that they're pushing it further, or that there are just more opportunities than TPM. 3D isn't right for every movie, but it works for these.

When they did the Special Editions, they digitally recomposited most (if not all) of the effects shots anyway, so they should probably be able to use that information to the same ends they're using it for the 3D prequels. If not, well, there are significantly fewer elements in most of the OT shots, so given enough time they could probably do the cut-and-pull type of job on most of it just fine. Grain shouldn't really be that big of a problem, either - other films have been post-converted from the pre-digital era, the effects in at least ANH were shot in such a way to minimize image degradation, and TPM wasn't shot on digital anyway and turned out fine.

Here's the problem, the prequel 3D is going to look good, almost every shot is easier to work with because it's digitally composited in some way, often a character or vehicle or background is easy to pull out, and it's shot on digital so there's no film grain to fight. The OT was shot 36 years ago on film stock, the ANH film stock is destroyed and only the Special Editions remain and their digital effects work looks like garbage by today's standards, I mean it's shocking how awful the digital in the OT looks, it's horrendous, everything's blurry and cartoony and shoddy and jumpy, so all that is going to make a mess of the 3D conversion process. I suspect the OT won't handle conversion as well as the PT and people won't respond well to that.

I watched ANH on Blu-Ray and it's amazing how horrible and out of place the digital shots look next to the original elements. I think the higher resolution of Blu-Ray makes those scenes look even worse than they did in 1997 (or 2004, when they redid them for the DVD). The scene with Han and Jabba looked so bad that it reminded me of one of those parody movies where they intentionally make bad special effects as part of the gag. It's hard for me to believe that somebody at Lucasfilm actually watched that said, "Okay, that looks good enough."

Which is funny, because the actual footage from 1977 looks really good, crisp and smooth. It's only the "improvements" from the Special Edition and the DVD release that look horrible, choppy, and out of place. The nice thing about film is that it doesn't really have a resolution, so you can scan it into the computer at print quality resolution if you want to, which is significantly higher resolution than Blu-Ray. A 1080p Blu-Ray image has 1440x1080 pixels for an images that is 20" by 15" at 72 dpi. A print quality 20" by 15" images would be 6000x4500 pixels at 300 dpi (although the dpi can go up to 1600 for print images, which would be 32000x24000 pixels). So a basic print-quality image is over 4 times better than the so-called "high-resolution" Blu-Ray image. That's why the old films never seem to have a problem translating to the 1080p format. Clearly, they never considered higher-resolution formats when rendering out the Special Edition CG sequences.

I bought the Star Wars Blu-Ray set a month or so ago, but I've been hesitant to watch ESB and ROTJ because of how badly ANH was marred by the so-called "enhancements". I might just trade in the entire Blu-Ray set and not risk soiling my memories of ESB and ROTJ.

Besides, the packaging for the 6-movie Blu-Ray set is the worst design I've ever seen. It feels like I'm going to snap the discs in half just trying to remove them from those ridiculous sleeves they packed them in.

Now I'm fully willing to join the campaign to get the pre-Special Edition Original Trilogy on Blu-Ray. I think George Lucas owes it not just to his fans, but to the entire movie industry.

Oh wait, this thread is about the 3D versions of Ep2 and 3 right? I might go see Ep3 in 3D, but that's only if I have absolutely nothing else to do. After what I saw on the ANH Blu-Ray, I'm almost hesitant to go see the OT in 3D now. But, maybe if everything in the movie looks like a South Park cardboard cutout, then the Special Edition effects won't look so bad anymore.

"To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence… When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis

StarWars.com posted that the conversions of AOTC and ROTS have been "postponed" so they can focus on Episode VII. Whaa??? I really wonder what this will mean for the tie-in products and the packaging designs. Presumably they won't be released until after Episode VII, if at all, meaning the same for the OT. Very odd indeed.